


A Universal History of Infamy

by syrupwit



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-18 00:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18109742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: Excerpts from the revised and updated second edition (1874).





	A Universal History of Infamy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).



**_THE BLADE OF BLACK SALLY_ **

Death comes once for most. For Black Sally, it came thrice. Her first life was lost in the grime and gunpowder of the Morley Insurrection, her last parceled out in a garret just south of the Distillery District. In the decades between, Black Sally amassed a network of criminal enterprises across Dunwall. Her beauty and lust for combat were renowned. Her fiercest opposition sprang from the City Watch, including Captain Jules Roebin, who claimed responsibility for her end until his own death. Legend holds that Black Sally’s famous knife still thirsts to shed Watch blood.

 

**_SLACKJAW, PRINCE OF URCHINS_ **

When Black Sally fell, her lieutenant rose. Ruthless and scheming, but not cruel, the former street urchin known as Slackjaw quickly garnered a reputation among the small-time gangs scrapping over Sally’s leftovers. In defeating the then-preeminent Hatter gang, Slackjaw and his Bottle Street Boys established a stranglehold on the nascent Gristolian whiskey industry. Plague offered a new opportunity: the distillation of bootleg elixir. These pursuits were abandoned in the 1840s for more legitimate ventures. While Slackjaw never claimed any parentage, sources trace his origin to the 1795 visit of a Tyvian prince to an unnamed brothel.

 

**_THE HERETICAL SORCERESS VERA MORAY_ **

Children of the slums knew to avoid her path: Granny Rags, a hunched figure of muttered rhymes and grasping hands. Few could have named her as Lady Vera Moray. An ill-fated journey to Pandyssia, followed by misadventure in a sanatorium, had rendered the former court favorite blind and mad. She could summon rats and mists, and was observed to craft foul charms from bone. Sightings of Moray dwindled after 1837, vanishing altogether by 1841. Records acknowledge a gang leader in Karnaca who later achieved similar feats with unholy artifacts; however, no link was ever proven.

 

**_MORTIMER HAT AND HIS CRUEL NURSE_ **

“Nurse” William Trimble was expelled from the Academy of Natural Philosophy in 1825, the outcome of a wager and a rivalry gone awry. Twelve years later, he ran the Hatter gang. Draper’s Ward provided a front for their more lawful endeavors. In the rooms above the textile mill, intubated, starved, alone but for his loathed caregiver, tormented by the ceaseless churning of the waterwheel, the Hatters’ former boss was subjected to Trimble’s experiments. Though the manner of Mortimer Hat’s revenge is unknown, it must have occurred between 1842 and 1847. Both men disappear thereafter.

 

**_LIZZY STRIDE, RIVER PIRATE_ **

How the Wrenhaven stank in those days. It was more like a road than a river: thick with waste, discarded cargo, the drifting bodies of the dead. Those waterside passages not overrun with rats were invariably guarded by river krusts, pernicious mollusks whose acidic secretions eroded both armor and skin. Treasure awaited the cautious hunter; at each krust’s center lay a pearl. Lizzy Stride, numbered among the pirates and smugglers then afflicting the river, was first to harness krust “spit” as a weapon. Rumor intimated that Stride, like the krust, harbored secret mercies in her heart.

 

**_DAUD, THE KNIFE OF DUNWALL_ **

No serious discussion of plague-era Dunwall can omit mentioning Daud. Witch-born, cursed by man and god alike, the notorious assassin led his shadowy band of mercenaries on a destructive rampage across the city, allegedly culminating in the assassination of Jessamine I. Prior to his disappearance in 1837, Daud was believed to have personally murdered between three and five hundred people, most of them aristocrats. To this day, his name brings a hush to the room and a pall to the faces of those who remember. The Knife may be gone; the wound is yet fresh.

 

**_THE REDEMPTIVE TRAITOR BILLIE LURK_ **

That Billie Lurk enters the historical record at all may be attributed to Daud, and the careful journals kept by him and his Whalers. Daud’s neat, cramped script describes Lurk alternately as student, mark, and lover. She excelled in black magic and racked up a body count to rival Daud’s own. Her career as his second-in-command was cut short by a devastating but unspecified act of treachery. Daud left Dunwall shortly after. Whether Lurk’s coup spurred this event is impossible to determine. She appears nowhere else, consumed either by death or by its cousin, atonement.

 

**_CORVO ATTANO, THE MASKED FELON_ **

The interregnum of 1837 saw a multitude of political upheavals. The Lord Regent’s temporary government crumbled in a matter of weeks. First fell the High Overseer, to the Heretic’s Brand, which none under his command could recall administering; second, Parliament, abruptly bereft of two deciding votes; third, the noblewoman funding Burrows’ excesses, to her abduction from a well-attended party. Fourth fell the Regent. At the scene of each of these mysterious occurrences, witnesses described a figure in a skull-like mask. Doggedly, piece by piece, the Empress’s lover wrought vengeance on those who had betrayed her.

 


End file.
